Inches versus centimeters

I had a House of Dumb moment and remembered that brevity is the soul of wit, and so…

I posited the failure of online Left-wing feminism in the form of The F Word website in my post about the heroic Hannah Shah here.

To be fair to the F Word people and out of respect for Mrs. Northwester I looked through a search of their site on Islam and immediately found this, which included the following amongst a range of comments from the sensible to the not-sensible-at-all:

You'll find similar extremism and misogyny in all the major religion. You should check out what some of the far right rabbis and bishops say. Look at the bloody Pope!

Question One: does the Pope or any other mainstream Christian or Jewish group actually practice or demand a return to this? Or this? Or this for lesbians?

Now I can see the huge invasion that, for example, anti-abortion leaders are accused of making against women’s’ rights, and can understand the arguments against it.

(I disagree because I suspect that the unborn are people and therefore that their right to life trumps labour pains and lost months and years from a woman’s career and years of unwanted parenthood, but that’s not my point here. I could be wrong.)

My point is that even if we take anti-abortion as an intolerable imposition against a person’s individual dignity, there’s bad, and then there’s worse, and then there’s worst. Where’s the sense of proportion here? Why attack a mongoose for being smelly but try so hard to find excuses for the cobra?

The important thing, I think, is to keep some understanding that religion is a spectrum.

It sure is. Catholicism’s the one that won’t let you have an abortion. Salafism Sunni or Shia are the ones that often won’t let you have a life.

Question Two: even if we were to accept that Christians are truly the enemies of women’s’ rights, it is also true that it’s mostly American Christians and Israeli Jews (who have the belief systems as well as the willingness to fight if necessary) who stand between western women and Islam as it really is out there in the real world where the money and the religious police and the nukes are. So why is it the Christians and Jews amongst us that the Western Left-wing feminist movement are principally opposed to?

It’s physically safer in the short term, I’m sure, but in the long term..?

And we do have to consider the wider cultural context of Islamophobia into consideration, too.

Question Three: why should I, as an infidel, a democrat, an idolater, a father and a husband NOT be afraid of Islam?

See? For me that’s brief.

Dumb brevity.

Dumb brevity.

Dumb brevity.

Dumb brevity.

Dumb brevity.